Finally pulled the trigger on a new truck. Looking forward to potentially carrying my PA in the truck bed rather than using my trailer. It's 5.5 foot bed so about 7' with the gate down. Thought I'd look into one of those extenders that fit in the hitch receiver. Any one have any experience with those?

I hauled my first PA in a short F150 for more than two years on a bed extender with no issues at all. I finally built a trailer that works great for it and use it most of the time. Now I tend to pre-load the boat with rods etc the night before the trip and I like that a lot better. I build a cleaning station that fits on the back of the PA and sitting on the trailer makes it a better height than on the tailgate of my truck.

When I was using my truck I started getting some light deformation on really hot days if I loaded the night before. We had a lot of nights when the temp did not dip much below 90 degrees. I traced the bottom of the hull and made some plywood cradles to hold the boat in the bed of the truck. I used two of the same cradles and made two more when I modified a small john boat trailer for PA hauling.

Thanks for your feedback, gents. Do you have any comments on brands of extensions? is one better than the others? Do you ever have problems with the tail of the extension bottoming out when transitiooing to an incline?

I measured the bed @ 93" from front wall to end of tali gate, that will leave 6 feet of PA hanging out the back. Most extenders add about 4 feet from the end of the receiver, so I should pick up about 2.5 feet of extension beyond the end of the tailgate. My truck has the tailgate step system and the interior of the tailgate is not flat. There is a slight bulge from the handle and mechanism. I will need to use some type of padding - perhaps the bunks I made for my trailer.

Until I made the cradles custom to fit the PA for the pickup bed, I used pool noodles split,bundled and duck taped together and placed them under the hollows to spread some of the load out on the hull. You don't realize how much rocker the PA has until you start attaching it to a flat surface.

Another option is to hang a "sling" from side to side at each end of the bed and across the tailgate extender if it has the "goalpost" type ends as mine did.

Good input Phill. below is a picture of my PA trailer and the foam bunks I made for it. I could adapt those for use in the truck since they are 48" wide and the bed is 50" wide betwwen the wheel wells.

I use a bed extender exclusively with a similar truck (Titan crew cab) to transport my PA. It works well and I use the pool noodle & tape method to keep the hull from getting beat up on the T-Bar. As far as brands go mine is from extend-a-truck, but there all pretty similar since there just a couple of pieces of welded tubular steel. Try Harbor Freight if you have one where you live. They are inexpensive there ~$60. may be tough to find it on the floor, but if you ask they generally have it in the stockroom.

The "T" on all of the bed extenders is vertical to the receiver extension bar and is adjustable using a pin kotter key. The PA is easy to secure with 2 nylon loading straps, one around the PA & bar load bar, and one through the front handle which loops through the tie downs mounted in the forward section of the truck bed. Pretty simple and easy to load everything the night before as others have said.

One final thing. Get yourself a Red Flag made of some tough material that you can tie off the back handle to keep yourself street legal.

I got the truck bed extender - ordered one on e-bay. Looks pretty good (See pic below). Fairly solid - it will definitely take the weight. It's rated at 150 lbs direct weight/ 300 lbs distributed between rack and truck.

Unfortunately, my PA is at my vacation home in the Sierras, but I set up the extender and put a 2x4 on it and set the end of it to the length the PA will reach. On my my F-150, the bed distance to the tip of the tailgate is 7' 9", so 6' of PA out the back. The extender brings that out to 10' 6", so just over 3 feet of final over hang.

The extender came with a red flag. I'm thinking about getting a set of trailer lights to attach temporarily to the end of the PA in transit. I'll see once I actually get the PA up on the truck.